


From Cradle to Grave

by TetrodotoxinB



Series: Bad Things Bingo 2018 [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bad Things Happen Bingo, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Handwavey medical nonsense, Horror, Hurt No Comfort, I don't do shit like Saw or whatever, I don't know how to tag this, Just don't expect it to be happy okay?, Sam POV, Square filled: Healing Pod Malfunction, The Cradle, This is not a graphic horror story, bad things are happening, injuries, it has some glitches that need working out, sort of major character death but also not, this is a horror story, uh oh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-26 11:18:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14999780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TetrodotoxinB/pseuds/TetrodotoxinB
Summary: Sam just wants Clint to make it home, and Dr. Cho's Cradle seems like the miracle they need when. But not all miracles deliver what's expected.





	From Cradle to Grave

**Author's Note:**

> Created for Bad Things Happen Bingo to fill the square: Healing Pod Malfunction.
> 
> Thanks to [Mari_Knickerbocker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mari_Knickerbocker) for pointing out some mistakes and helping get my life together to post this. Any remaining mistakes are mine! (and you can't have them)

“Tell Presbyterian we’re inbound. Have a trauma unit ready,” called Sam.

“I have already informed them,” JARVIS answered over the Quinjet PA.

Sam ignored the AI’s words in favor of focusing on the task at hand. Clint was losing dangerous amounts of blood and with a wound that large there was no way he could apply pressure safely or effectively. He was reduced to using a compression wrap and giving fluids as fast as he could. But pushing bag after bag of fluids was a double-edged sword, so while Clint’s blood pressure stayed up, his oxygen sats went down. Sam could only watch helplessly as he replaced one eventual death with another.

“Nat,” Clint mumbled, his hand only barely lifting off the stretcher as he tried to wave her over.

“Romanov, he wants you,” Sam called over his shoulder.

Nat’s wide eyes met Sam’s as she settled next to Clint, asking for some sort of reassurance but Sam just shook his head. Nat nodded sharply once and swallowed, plastering on the fakest smile Sam had ever seen her wear.

“Hey, pal.”

“Nat,” Clint whispered. “Tell Laura and the kids that I’m sorry.”

Nat shook her head, sending her red hair bouncing around her shoulders. “No. You can apologize yourself.”

Clint smiled and shook his head, his eyes unfocused but still bright. “I don’t think so, not this time.”

Sam swallowed and adjusted his hands where they pressed on Clint’s side. Clint gasped and flexed under Sam’s hands, the change in pressure obviously painful. 

“Sorry, man. Just hang in there,” Sam reassured him. “JARVIS, can you get me an ETA?”

“We are five minutes from Avengers’ Tower, sir.”

“Presbyterian!” shouted Sam. Of all the times that JARVIS could make this first mistake it had to be now, when there was no margin for error.

“Sir, we’ve been rerouted to the Tower. Dr. Helen Cho has a trauma team on standby and is equipped to deal with emergencies like this. Her Cradle is capable of tissue regeneration and is projected to improve Mr. Barton’s immediate survivability by approximately 37%,” JARVIS explained.

Anything involving the words “improved survivability” was worth a shot in Sam’s book, though experimental medicine didn’t exactly fill him with enthusiasm. 

“Alright,” Sam agreed. 

Five more minutes. They could swing that.

*

The minute the cargo bay doors opened the stretcher was swarmed by medical personnel of every stripe. Sam and Nat found themselves pushed aside as Clint was whisked away down to the lab.

Sam stripped off his gloves and laid a hand on Nat’s shoulder. “Cho’s good. Clint’s gonna be fine.”

Honestly, Sam wasn’t so sure. That kind of blood loss could cause any number of long-term problems, never mind the gaping hole in Clint’s side where intestines, part of a kidney, a rib, and a chunk of spleen used to be. Honestly, without Cho’s Cradle, Clint would be in for a life of tube feedings, ostomies, a compromised immune system, and probably a helluva lot of neurological damage. And those things aside, he’d be lucky not to die of sepsis or just outright shock from the blood loss. 

But Cho worked miracles, something even JARVIS was confident about. That had to count for something.

*

Three and half hours later, still waiting outside the lab with Nat, Steve, Thor, Tony, and Bruce, Sam thought it counted for a helluva lot. Clint was hanging in there and they were knitting back together according to the nurse’s word. They couldn’t see him, but they were hopeful.

*

“How do you feel?” Steve asked, ever earnest and concerned.

“Tired. Everything hurts. I think I’m made of plastic now,” Clint complained.

Sam smiled from where he listened by the door. Nat and Steve had immediately occupied the sides of the bed, and Thor’s enormous frame was blocking Sam from seeing much else. He didn’t much care, though. What mattered was that Clint was alive. 

He listened to the concerned inquiries, the soft back and forth of absurd questions and answers, and the message Clint’s kids had recorded to play for him once he was awake. But all too soon a nurse was hustling them out so that Clint could rest. 

“Sam, wait,” Clint called.

The others patted Sam on the shoulders as they passed, their gratitude evident on their faces. He appreciated it, really he did, but he’d preferred the anonymity of being a PJ. Only rarely did anyone come back to the medic that’d pulled them out of the middle of whatever hell hole they’d been in. Facing him would have been facing the person who’d seen them at their absolute lowest, and Sam understood entirely why most folks didn’t want that. So it was awkward to have so many people around him acknowledging what he’d done, especially when it had boiled down to applying pressure and not panicking.

Sam approached the bed with a small smile, too tired for any more than that. Clint was holding up his hand and Sam took it in his own as the door clicked shut behind Steve leaving only the two of them.

“I really appreciate it, Sam. I don’t know if I would have made it back to the Tower if you weren’t there,” Clint said earnestly.

Sam looked up, his eyes meeting Clint’s for the first time. Clint was tired, sporting more than a few bruises on his face and neck, and looked for all the world like Clint should look. But his eyes.

His eyes filled Sam with a cold dread that made his heart beat double-time and he involuntarily took a step back, barely avoiding ripping his hand out of Clint’s. But he stopped himself, forcing himself to smile and breathe calmly. He’d had weird reactions to a rescue, especially one where he worked on someone he knew. He needed sleep and a few days off. Nothing more.

Twisting his face into the best approximation of a smile that he could muster, Sam stepped back towards Clint. 

“I’m just glad you’re gonna be alright, man. It was touch and go, and I gotta admit, it scared the hell out of me,” Sam said.

Clint nodded, the little frown on his face easing now that Sam wasn’t actively looking like he was about to bolt. “Yeah, scared the shit out of me, too.”

They were quiet a moment, Sam thinking over the day’s events, feeling Clint’s hand warm and alive in his. Clint squeezed his hand lightly drawing Sam’s attention back to him.

“You alright? You look a little, I dunno, weird,” Clint observed.

Sam shook his head to brush off the concern and looked up, again meeting Clint’s eyes. Whatever had been there before that had triggered the panic was no longer there, and Sam let out a sigh of relief knowing it was all in his head.

“Yeah. I just need some sleep. See you in the morning, alright?”

Clint smiled and nodded. “You bet.”

*

Even with the Cradle’s seemingly miraculous healing features Clint stayed in recovery for another week. Sam and the others spent a fair amount of time with him playing cards and arguing about the feeding tube that he was adamant he didn’t need, even though his body was still integrating his newly fabricated digestive system. Clint celebrated the tube’s removal by yanking it out of his nose and tossing it in the garbage himself. 

When, he was finally discharged and able to go home, Sam and Steve helped him carry his stuff to the car that was waiting in the garage. Nat waved as the car pulled away, taking him back to his family and his farm. 

Though he couldn’t be sure why, Sam felt a weight lift from him the moment the car pulled out onto the street. He chalked it up to Clint’s dying words to Nat on the jet. Sam had talked to Laura since — she had been adamant about thanking him, if not in person then at least over the phone. 

But now Clint could make the circle complete. He was, just as Nat had said, going home to apologize to Laura himself. Sam decided that after everything it was just the relief of seeing him off, hale and whole, that felt so good.

*

Two days later Nat inexplicably left in the middle of an intelligence briefing. Sam didn’t ask, that was Steve’s place, and Nat didn’t say. But she returned the next morning with Clint in tow, her face set into an unreadable mask that did not brook conversation. 

Clint, even for having been ripped away from his family so quickly and unexpectedly after a near death experience, seemed remarkably chipper. Sam found it eerie, even unsettling, but Sam just chalked up his disquietude to the horror of trying to keep Clint’s guts in his abdomen with his hands. Clint was always hurting himself, it was only natural then that it came with some level of unease. Clint was that friend where Sam had to continually be on the lookout for the latest injury. It was a lot, but it wasn’t anything more sinister than that.

But as days turned into weeks and Clint stayed at the Tower, never once mentioning Laura or the kids, Sam’s unease grew into something like the blind panic he’d first felt at Clint’s bedside. He seemed… changed, and not at all for the better. The jagged yet gentle edges that had landed them with a one-eyed dog had been replaced with callous indifference, though there was nothing Sam could put his finger on to prove it. 

The poor dog began to flee from the very sight of Clint, and Sam understood the feeling. The look in Clint’s eyes was back. It made Sam’s stomach drop, his heart race, and his hands tremble. Even indoors Sam took to wearing sunglasses around Clint in an attempt to forestall eye contact. He also kept the dog close. The dog, who no longer answered to Lucky, always knew when Clint was coming and tended to give Sam enough lead time to escape a significant portion of any probable interactions.

Nat seemed to be doing her share of avoiding as well, and when she couldn’t she was stiff-backed and tight-lipped with Clint. Sam took her apprehension as a sign that he wasn’t going insane all by himself, but even though Sam was sure he was reading Nat right, he never asked. Serious delusions of someone having turned into — whatever Clint had turned into — weren’t the kind of thing people just talked about.

*

“Hey, Sam,” Clint said between bites.

Sam swallowed and looked up, struggling not to panic as he suddenly found himself the object of Clint’s attention. “What’s up?”

“I’m helping Hill guard a transport that’s headed from the DC office to the Compound upstate. I could use a hand. You busy this weekend?”

All of the regular sounds of dinner had stopped — no clinking of silverware on plates, no chewing, no rustle of napkins. Sam realized abruptly that all eyes were on him, the length of his hesitation going from “thinking over his weekend” to flat out avoidance. 

“Yeah, I can do that. No problem,” he agreed, feeling suddenly compelled to answer. 

Clint grinned, a horrible predatory thing that looked every bit like Clint and yet nothing like him at all. “Great. I’ll let her know.”

Immediately, Clint tucked back into his meal, and then slowly the others joined in until their team dinner returned to the silence that had become customary since Clint’s encounter with the Cradle. 

*

Sam sat opposite Clint on the hard wooden bench in the back of an empty convoy truck. There was no light save what filtered in from the flaps on the back and Sam made a point of looking anywhere but at Clint. 

In terms of avoidance, looking at the wall was a short-term tactic at best, especially given that he was scheduled to be in the back of this transport with Clint for another five hours before they stopped off at a rest area for bathroom breaks. 

“I know you want to ask,” Clint said. His voice was low, so low that Sam almost didn’t catch it at first. “Come on, you noticed before anyone else. I saw it in your eyes. You want to know. _Ask me,_ ” he hissed, his grin all teeth.

Sam looked right at Clint and gripped his gun tighter. “Man, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Clint laughed, a horrible grating sound like glass scraping along metal that made Sam’s teeth ache with its malevolence. “So you don’t want to know why Laura had Nat come pick me up?”

He wasn’t stupid and Sam knew a threat when he heard one. “I’ve never asked what happened and I’m not going to start now. People have martial trouble. Doesn’t make it my business just because we work together.”

“Oh, but it does, doesn’t it?”

Clint moved first, a knife in his right hand and raised in his direction. Sam didn’t hesitate. He aimed and fired three shots, center mass. At such close range Clint’s body armor wasn’t enough to stop the high caliber rounds that ripped holes into him, and after a moment he staggered and dropped. 

As the trucks swerved off the road, voices already calling for sitrep, blood pooled under Clint’s body and ran down between the floorboards of the transport. Sam stood stock still watching, too scared to touch Clint to try and staunch the flow, too relieved to want to. 

He was still standing there gripping his rifle which remained trained on Clint’s body, when the STRIKE team piled into the transport with him. 

“What happened?” demanded Rumlow.

“He tried to stab me,” Sam stammered.

But even as he looked at the body the only thing in Clint’s hand was his canteen. 

“With what?” Rumlow pressed.

Sam shook his head. “He had a knife. I swear he had a knife.”

“Get him out of here,” Rumlow barked to the rest of the team.

Patted down, disarmed, and handcuffed, Sam was marched into the back of another transport. As he sat down, wedged between two very angry STRIKE team members, Sam heard a whisper. The sound poured into his ears like a thick, black oil, and it clung, wrapping itself around his mind, constricting like a serpent.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Sam. You’re going to regret it.”


End file.
